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Mixing Hanukkah and Christmas

By Kj Dell’Antonia December 20, 2011 3:08 pmDecember 20, 2011 3:08 pm

It seemed like a good idea at the time, it really did. Nine years ago, when my oldest son was about 18 months old, my mother gave us a menorah shaped like a train, and I bought candles, and insisted to my husband that we light them.

My husband, Rob, was largely indifferent, but he agreed. The question of Christmas was still slightly fraught between us. My parents weren’t religious, but the religion we didn’t practice was unquestionably Christian. We embraced the pagan trappings of various holidays with a vengeance, and rejoiced at the arrival of endless Christmas carols and the all-encompassing red and green décor starting the day after Halloween. My husband was raised Jewish, in a household where complaints about the ubiquity of Christmas were just as ubiquitous every December. By the time we had our son Sam, Rob had been receiving gifts wrapped in blue and white paper from under my parents’ Christmas tree for nearly 10 years, but his attitude was more one of patient endurance than Deck the Halls.

By this time we had a house of our own, and while I wanted to decorate for Christmas, I didn’t want any disputes about the dominance of the holiday to extend to our living room. And so that year we lit the candles every night. The next year, each night of Hanukkah, we lit the candles, and we gave Sam, then 2 years old, a little present. Rob didn’t get presents for Hanukkah as a child (actually, he says he got a dollar the first night, and two the second night, and so on). He didn’t care about giving them, either. But I was still trying to give this equal play. My parents loaded their only grandchild up with Christmas gifts. I figured we had to do something to make Hanukkah look good. The year after that, we lit the candles, and we gave Sam a little present that got a little bigger every night.

You can see where this is going, right? After Sam came Lily, and after Lily, the deluge. For the past two years, we have had four children. Four children times eight nights is 32 presents. Even if five of those are nothing but a bag of gelt or a Lego mini-figure, it’s still an awful lot of wrapped boxes, and an organizational shopping nightmare. In an attempt at balance, I decreed that we would not give them Christmas presents — other family members and Santa could take care of what went under the tree — but while that reduced the gifts, it didn’t increase my satisfaction. I’d made a tactical error. This Christmukkah festival of rampant consumerism was not at all what I’d set out to do back when I bought a few trinkets and a dreidel for a toddler who was still more excited about playing with the box.

The truth is that when I bought those first gifts, I didn’t think about a future of multiple kids clamoring for gifts, or about any past celebrations Rob might have had in mind. I had a cute little kid and an excuse to buy presents, and in many ways I resented being forced to look at the ubiquity of Christmas in a different light. Buying presents was my way of trying to mold Hanukkah into something familiar. Pretending that Hanukkah even wanted to be a festival with equal billing was a really good way to pretend that this question of raising kids without an obvious religious culture to fall back on — without something clear in which to believe or not believe — was going to be an easy one. We’d just do it all equally badly. Somehow, that didn’t make anyone happy.

I resolved the question of the Hanukkah gifts fairly easily. It was my “tradition,” and I unilaterally changed it (with some blowback, which will surely continue this year). We still light candles, but every night of Hanukkah comes with a family activity of some sort (card playing, cookie making, a highly desirable trip to the local indoor pool). The gift is the time we spend together, with maybe a board game thrown in. On Christmas morning come the material gifts (and every child gives as well as gets). Neither activity has much to do with the religious root of the holiday, but both bring us a whole lot of merry and happy.

The question at the core of it all defies an easy resolution — as it should. How, people ask the interfaith couple, are you raising the kids? Well, both. Or neither. And I’m not sure we really qualify, at this point, to be called “interfaith,” when we largely combine a faith in coffee with a faith in bagels. We’ve gone from interfaith to intrafaith: we believe in our power to get this right enough to work for us. I know all the words to “Eight Candles Shine for the Maccabees.” My husband just bought, with no prompting from me, an Elf on the Shelf.

Every year we muddle our way through December a little differently, but never thoughtlessly. The true value of an interfaith season has turned out to be exactly what I was trying to avoid, back when I first started piling on the Hanukkah gifts — the need to examine every tradition a little harder, and to think a little more about whether it’s really important, and why. We don’t need to blend everything. We can let both holidays be themselves, as we find our own way within them. What I wish for our kids, as they grow, is that they do the same.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more